Junkie XL - Saturday Teenage Kick
With enough energy to power a small town Junkie XL have produced an album that should challenge the notion that bands using electronics in a big way are apt to let the samples do the talking.
From the opening of Underachievers, which will no doubt be a big hit somewhere in the world this year, to the closing bars of the seventeen minutes plus (yep seventeen minutes plus) Future In Computer Hell, there are ever present and unrelenting manic vocals which supercharge the whole album.
We ran a basic word search to find out more about the band/entity and soon realized that Junkie XL is in fact Netherlands based. The English language soundbites on the first couple of tracks may make you think otherwise but after listening through to the whole album there is definitely a north Europe "feel" to the whole thing.
Drum samples are unceremoniously chopped up into little pieces and re-assembled, there's heavy use of an Ensoniq sounding guitar sample and some decidedly spacey processed loops and SFX which all come together to produce a rather unique collection of songs.
For lucky owners of the compact disc there's an OMMUS compatible program embedded into the CD itself. You'll need 4BLADE and B.Noise drivers to get the most out of the software.
Rating: 822,907 (out of a possible 1,000,000)
